Thursday, 29 November 2012

Wednesday was probably a milestone day in what might
be the first stage in the future development of the college. I spent all day
with students from the foundation course who have opted to take the fine art
specialist route. They came up from Vernon Street to the fine art area in the
Blenheim Walk building and I worked with them in the first year studio.

Historically foundation students went away from Leeds
in order to broaden their experience of life, however when I taught on
foundation most of the students were from the area of Leeds and its surrounding
towns. Over the last twenty years things have changed and what was a trickle of
foundation students from outside the area has become a flood and Leeds is now
much more student friendly as a city. Several of the smaller foundation courses
have closed and many of the new art and design degree providers will now accept
students directly from ‘A’ level. This has meant that foundation courses if
they are to survive have to on the one hand ensure they are able to develop
portfolios of a quality to get into those degree programmes that still insist
on foundation portfolios, (and these tend to be the older, better courses as
well as of course University of the Arts London, Goldsmiths and Glasgow School
of Art), and to become large enough to make themselves economically viable.

The degree course at Leeds College of Art is seen as a
‘new’ course. It has therefore not really been on the radar as far as
foundation staff were concerned, it had yet to prove itself. However how long
does it take to prove that a course is good and what does the proof consist of?
For several reasons there has been no real connection between the two areas,
something that has always grieved me, as I spent so many years working with
fine art foundation students and now several years helping to develop a
particular ethos for the degree course. There are as with all courses faults,
but the course is now maturing, the student body gets stronger as application
rates get higher and we can be more selective. This is perhaps something
foundation students were in the past worried about, they might be a strong
student on foundation and go on to degree and find themselves amongst weaker
ones. That element of competition needed to move things on to a higher level
would therefore be missing. The other issue of course is the fact that the
course is in Leeds. Well the reality is if you are not in London you are in the
provinces. Saying that, Leeds has developed a much healthier arts scene over the
past few years and there are many more opportunities for students to engage
with an arts community whilst they study and immediately on graduation. At the
end of the day, if people want to go to London they will, there are still many
MA opportunities down there and the fine art course now has a track record of
sending people on them.

The new reality is also of course a financial one.
Students applying to arts and humanities degrees now have to pay full fees of
between six to nine thousand pounds. There is no matched funding from
government so everything depends on this fee income. Foundation courses come
under the umbrella of Further Education and therefore are under a different
funding system, however the income per student is only a third of what a degree
student brings in. So the reason for keeping hold of the foundation course
shifts slightly. It can no longer operate exclusively as a feeder for out of
Leeds courses. If it starts to operate more as a feeder programme for the
degrees it will help the college maintain good levels of application and
therefore enable it to survive through a time of heavy education cuts. This of
course is a two-way contract, if degree courses don’t meet targets, they will
close, if they close the college closes and the foundation programme with
it.So the real call is are the courses
offered at degree level of a good enough standard to support this shift? The
best of them are. Students are sharp enough to see what is happening and
application rates for surface pattern, graphics and fine art have remained
pretty good. The degree shows are comparable to others, some of the best work
being exemplary. I would like to see more studio space made available for more
ambitious work, but the workshop facilities are good and above all the
educational philosophy of the course has at last started to flesh itself out.
This is a philosophy centered on embodied thinking. It is not a conceptually
driven programme, it supports the idea that artists are makers and that
thinking starts with doing. However as an understanding of this has deepened
the theoretical understanding of how concepts develop through making has
deepened, paradoxically this understanding now driving more conceptual work. In
the end this is about confidence and although confidence is easily destroyed, at
the moment I think it is strong enough to offer foundation students something
worthwhile.

The day was spent unpicking the processes of the
critique. Ten foundation students spent the day with seven third year fine art
students and myself. The third year students were interested in developing
teaching skills, all of them considering whether or not to go into teaching.
Therefore right at the start of the day I had to open this out to everyone to
get an awareness of and agreement to what was happening. Both sets of students
needed to get something from the day. The foundation students are about a month
into specialist area and rather than give them something extra to do, the day
was constructed to help them to become more aware of the possibilities for
practice already inherent in their nascent development. Some had
sketchbooks/notebooks with them, others nothing; but that didn’t matter as the
sessions were about opening out possibilities from any information presented.

I had made sure the third year students had re-read a
handout on the critique and that they were clear that we were looking at
possibilities. I also added to this handout a list of strategies for ideas
development.

During the day there were also two planned breakout
sessions, the first a tour of facilities and the second a tour of the studios,
both led by the students.

One brave foundation student volunteered to go first
and I opened the crit out to everyone as a model for the others to follow,
telling them that once I had taken the lead, I would go away for a while to let
them get to know each other and to see if they could handle the situation as
both learners and facilitators.

The first part of this was a how to listen and check
for understanding session. The foundation student presenting had a small
notebook, perhaps six or seven pages of notes, most of which were written and a
small diagram. He spoke about three separate ideas he had. In order to get
everyone to understand what he was getting at I had to keep throwing back at him
what he was saying. “Do you mean this or that” or “from what you have said I
understand the idea as being like this or that” etc. This takes a while, but is
worth it because we all get a much better understanding of where he is coming
from and what sorts of ideas these are.

Each idea is then unpicked. What are the concepts,
what are the materials, what type of practice is this? Etc etc. The idea is to
then take each component and then brainstorm around it. The students quickly
get their head around this and are very good at coming up with suggestions,
however if these suggestions start getting too off the wall, I remind them of
the focus, “we are trying to open out these issues” etc. All the time I keep
checking back with he student who presented, “Is this helping?” is there
another aspect you want us to open out etc. The final stage is to remind
ourselves of the different ideas emerging and to play a few games with them by
mixing and matching. Perhaps one concept applied to a totally different
materials idea, or a performative response applied to what were a series of
ideas surrounding the construction of an installation. Finally the student is
asked to ensure any notes taken are written up so that he understands them.
During the course of this more and more students join in and in particular the
foundation students are starting to have as much of a say as the fine art third
year. I can then talk to them about how facilitation and engagement are part of the same experience and that they both have responsibilities to the situation.
Educational situations don’t just happen, they have to be constructed. After
checking with the third years that they have got the situation under control
and the foundation students that they are happy with it I leave them to it for
a while.

When I come back they are all engaged and the rest of
the day follows on from this pattern, I take moments out every now and again to
check people understand the learning, but they all seem happy and ‘get it’. One
foundation student has to leave at dinner-time but says before she leaves that it
has been really rewarding, the processes and strategies to help overcome
creative blocks she particularly found useful.

Once it was all over and the foundation students left
I had a feedback session with the third years and they had found it useful as
well. It would be interesting to perhaps unpick the learning situation more
often, as better use of listening and checking of understanding skills would lead
to much better communication amongst the group as a whole.

Tuesday, 27 November 2012

The graduation ceremony on Friday reminded me that it’s not always fine art students I work with. As this blog is designed to get a feel
across of what it’s like to work in an art college perhaps it’s good to also
get a sense of the wider responsibilities I sometimes have to take on. Last
year as well as teaching on Fine Art I was working across all three years of DFGA concentrating on contextual and theoretical studies modules. In support I hosted a blog, this is
at: http://contextualandtheoreticalstudies.blogspot.co.uk/

It is now a closed blog, but archived posts will give
an indication of some areas covered.

In the meantime back on Fine Art I have just had two
days studio teaching with the second years and at the end of each day I’ve been
doing dissertation tutorials with third years, so by the time I get home I’m
exhausted. I made notes at the end of the day so will
post about what went on another time when I’m less knackered.

Friday, 23 November 2012

I was off work Monday and Tuesday with a chest
infection and only returned mid-week to do dissertation tutorials. I wasn’t
really well enough and ended up back in bed on Thursday, but came out again
today for the graduation ceremony for last year’s students which was held in Leeds Town
Hall. Still not quite recovered, I
arrived with a splitting headache, which would last all day and into the
evening.

I’ve been attending end of year leaving ceremonies, or
graduations for well over thirty years and it never ceases to amaze me how students change in such a short period of time. And yet in many ways they remain the same and
I change, each year getting older, the students returning bathed in their eternal youth, frozen in their late teens and early twenties, whilst I
outwardly age, inwardly remaining an eternal art student.

I had two groups of students I had taught graduating
this year, from Digital Film Games and Animation and Fine Art. I probably knew
the digital film students as well, if not more than the fine art students
because they were a small cohort and I was brought in to solve a problem with
their attitude over contextual studies. The fine art group is much bigger and I
didn’t get to teach them that much in their final year, a few days doing crits
and some sessions near the end as final shows loomed. Even so it was enough
time for me to feel bonded to them in some way. Enough time to hopefully pass
something on from that mound of accumulated knowledge of the business I’ve
managed to glean over the years.

A dreamlike distancing takes place when the students
don black Open University robes with their light blue and gold hoods and flat mortarboards.
What is designed to ensure the passing out ritual is remembered and has
significance also renders all the individuals into cyphers. Their strange flat-topped
headgear named after its resemblance to a plasterer’s hawk, operating as a last
tiny vestige of an apprentice’s passing out ceremony. A ceremony with perhaps a
longer and more dignified history than academia, these students inheriting a
tradition that for thousands of years was passed on from master to apprentice,
a skill based craft ridden occupation, muddied by the Carracci Brothers with
their dam academy. The students walk up onto the stage of the Town Hall, a hall
decorated with swirls of imitation marble, a wonderful celebration of craft, labour
and work, as they stride out to applause, their shoes speak of their time,
their bodies and heads of history and as they shake hands and receive their
certificate, somehow they also become strangers, people I no longer recognize.
They are suddenly older, in the past few months have matured without me
realizing it, now men and women, not the youngsters who arrived just over three
years ago.

I hope they do well, I hope their dreams are not crushed by reality.
Some will perhaps make art and survive, some may even go into art education. If
they do I hope it will be as good an experience as it has been for me. For all
its ups and downs, for all the attempts to smother the profession under layers
of administration and false learning goals, there is still a kernel of truth
and solid links that go back through all the connections of artists who have
taught artists who have taught art.

Thursday, 22 November 2012

It’s funny how memory works, once you start to
remember something, another related thing just pops into your mind. This
reminiscence lark is opening out some long dead synapses. The still life
situation was used in several other ways, in fact as I write even more are
falling into place, so perhaps I’ll have to edit some out for now.

Once the initial drawing colour and 3D introductions
were over we would usually move into a diagnostic period. This didn’t mean
doing one week of graphics, then a week of 3D, then fashion etc., which we
referred to as the carrousel system, it was a period where we set projects and
the way students answered these would hopefully diagnose whether or not they
were designers, 2D thinkers, problem solvers, pattern makers etc. This particular still life project was
designed as one of these diagnostic projects. It would have therefore been
something that would last for somewhere between five and ten days.

The Cubist still life

Cubism was still regarded on the foundation course as
a vitally important ingredient of twentieth century looking and thinking, an
understanding of simultaneity being at the core of this. We wanted to get over
to students that although the world was composed of lots of fragmented bits of
information, what good art or design could do was take in these fragments and
digest them, then regurgitate the synthesized parts as new wholes. These new
wholes would of course have to contain and make use of the life energy
of the original experiences. Certain approaches to Cubism were seen as ways to
grasp this, collage was another way in… this dam memory stuff, it keeps
throwing in more and more information, at this rate this will turn into some
Borges infinity.

A still life would be set up on a board, this could be
for instance things from the kitchen; kettle, pots and pans, bread knife,
spatula, whisk, cheese grater, mugs etc. This was placed on a table in the
middle of a circle of easels. Small composition thumbnail drawings are then
done by students in their sketchbooks and then they start working directly from
the still life. They are to focus on measurement and placement and can only use
line. After an hour or so the situation is rotated by 45o, they keep
drawing using the same sightlines across the room that were set up in the first
moments of the drawing. This new set of relationships of course starts to
obscure the first drawing, students are told if something makes it too hard to
‘see’ what you are drawing, remove it and replace it with what is arriving. The
situation is turned again and again, until all 360o have been
explored.

The next stage was to take the table away and put the
still life on the floor. Students were asked to draw their easels in close and
to draw the situation again looking down on the objects.

The emphasis was on observation and reducing the
information down to line and this could take all day. At the end of the day as
always the crit. took place. The emphasis of the crit. was on how different
energies and rhythms were captured within these dense drawings of lines and new
shapes discovered within the matrix were pointed to, some picked out by simply
rubbing out some of the charcoal lines with fingers. My job would be to explain
how these new forms held within them memories of different times and changing
relationships. The important issue was that we were starting to look for
‘significant form’, form that implied a ‘compacted’ relationship with previous
experiences. The handle of a jug seen from the side might be partly rubbed out
and now joined to the edge of a spatula seen from above, this new form a
composite carrying information from the observer’s changing perceptual
experience as well as being a synergetic form containing iconic visual elements
from both objects.

The second day was spent working back into the
drawings. We would stop at regular intervals so that differences in selection
could be pointed to. Some students would maintain a flickering blend of open
and closed forms, never actually nailing anything down. Others would be
starting to identify new forms and would start isolating these and pulling them
out by sharpening certain edges, some would be working all over the image,
others starting to create more 3D forms. As the day went on, tracing paper
would be given out and those wanting to pull out certain sections could so and
then rework into these. Student numbers were low enough then to be able to
spend quite some time with each one asking questions as to how they read the
work, what they were interested in and we could explain how certain approaches
might mean that they were naturally a certain type of artist/designer. (Looking
back I’m not so sure how accurate these diagnostic sessions were, but the
theory behind them seemed to stand up at the time).

Gradually some students might start to introduce
colour, others might start to make 3D models from information selected and by
the end of day three, lots of sketchbook work was being done as ideas were now
been tested out and variations tried.

By day four it was time to push these ideas further,
some of the best that I can remember went into wood and metal, one student in
particular making a series of objects where the lines from drawings alternated
between becoming edges made by the joining of solid wooden planes at angles to
each other and at other times joining lines between the solids made by using
bent metal rod; blocked masses and linear dynamics working in and out of each
other. Another student used the forms to create wooden inlays within objects
made to look like cubist furniture, so that at one moment you saw simple
pattern and at another you were made aware of where the drawn form came from.
In effect recreating the dynamics of looking and placing them back into a new
3D form. Pushing the images into these other areas is what the second week was
for. By the end of the two weeks, some students had produced a series of
paintings, others were still exploring drawing, some were developing shape and
pattern variations and there were always those who found themselves drawn to
Ted’s workshop. (Ted Winter was the course technician, he was always to be
found in the wood workshop on the top floor of the Vernon Street building and
he was a law unto himself)

The final afternoon would be the diagnostic crit. Did
whatever had been made live up to the expectation of the brief? Were the forms
found good or significant ones? Did they create good synergy and if so why? The
last thing was of course to leave students with a sense of possibility. Working
like this you could be a good…. The problem with this was that the most capable
students could actually do anything and this could muddy the waters as far as
the diagnostic element went.